School districts have discretion in determining when English learners can be reclassified as proficient in English, meaning they no longer need help in gaining fluency. But the different criteria that districts use and wide disparities in reclassification rates among districts have prompted Sen. Alex Padilla, D-San Fernando Valley, to call for consistency .
Padilla discusses his bill during a televised hearing Wednesday of the Senate Education Committee.
His bill, SB 1108, requires the California Department of Education to recommend uniform reclassification criteria, based on best practices, to the State Board of Education and encourages the board to adopt the changes. The bill also would recognize reclassified students as a subgroup for the Academic Progress Index so that the state would be able to track how well these students do over time on the state’s standardized tests.
SB 1108 passed its first hurdle Wednesday with a 5-1 vote in the Senate Education Committee and now goes to the Senate Appropriations Committee. It was endorsed at the committee hearing by representatives of several organizations advocating for English learners.
As Padilla noted in an interview, the 1.3 million Reclassified Fluent English Proficient students, as they are called, are nearly as numerous as the 1.5 million English learners in California. Together they make up 45 percent of the state’s students. So what happens to reclassified students – the curriculums and services they receive as English learners, how they are reclassified and how well